of poetry, Demented Panda and Koki were badly matched. Their mismatchedness could be seen in the accoutrements that they used in their writing lives. Demented Panda always carried a notebook, but a notebook that might be called the littlest of notebooks. He kept this notebook in the front pocket of whatever jacket he was wearing on any given afternoon and it was so small that there was never an unsightly bulge. He carried a notebook at all times because he was a poet but he carried a littlest notebook because he didn’t want to have to commit to writing anything really and the littleness of the notebook made it difficult to really write anything even if he had wanted to. Koki, on the other hand, carried with her at all times a backpack. In this backpack, she kept no fewer than five identical pens lined up for easy access in the pen holder section. And in the backpack itself she always kept at least one large and thick notebook and a book for reading in case she was stuck for some reason somewhere for a long period of time with nothing much to do, along with the usual detritus of modern female life, like lip balms and tampons and small tins of painkillers.
As they talked about the small plot of land they also, of course, talked about themselves. They talked about how their writing might sometimes do a kind of political work but still leave them dissatisfied. And they talked about their own tendency to write things so as to show themselves and others that they had the right attitudes about various things. They talked about failure and shame and about maybe making failure and shame the work, how maybe this talking of theirs was a kind of doing even if it was mostly doing nothing and, like poetry, seemed to make nothing happen. They talked about collaborating and how the personal and the political and bodies and sex and work and wanting and writing and writhing can get all fucked up, can get in the way, even if they could not exactly say what it was in the way of. They talked a lot about their bodies, their bodily aches and pains, their signs of infection, their nipple discharge and breast swelling, their bizarre behavior, agitations, hallucinations, and depersonalizations, their severe dizziness and drowsiness and confusion, how all these might be part of their collaboration as well, part of the picturesque story they might tell about living as a poet today, a story about that complex cipher of unstable relationships that define life under capitalism.
When they talked, Demented Panda usually said things in the negative and Koki usually took notes. After all this talking, Koki would then make the face, the not-quite-exasperated-yet-thinking-hard-about-it-but-also-frustrated face. And when Koki made the face Demented Panda usually made a joke or he would propose that the way beyond their impasses and their symptoms and side effects would be to create a giant mess. Demented Panda liked to talk about what he called the dialectics of mess, how he would hold his messes back or would hold his messes in his back where they could make pain instead of progress. He would talk about the messes he was maybe going to make, or talk about the messes he had already made but weren’t quite done somehow, or about how his back hurt from holding all his messiness there, or about his never-finished messertation, which he thought maybe was no longer a good or a relevant mess, or about his messuscripts that he also thought were no longer good or relevant messes. And then when he would get frustrated or bored with the mess coming out of his mouth, Demented Panda would turn and talk to his dogs in a voice that mocked itself in direct proportion to its seeming earnestness, as if the dogs could only understand philosophical questions or aesthetic questions or political questions if rendered in a cartoon voice.
In moments like these, Koki would again make the face, the not-quite-exasperated-yet-thinking-hard-about-it-but-also-frustrated face. She would stop taking notes, put down her pen, and tell Demented Panda to stop with the jokes. She would say that it was making her insane, not the jokes but the not finishing A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cities, and if he wasn’t going to do something productive for the collaboration with his small notebooks, then at least he could let her get some work done. And then it again would be Demented Panda’s turn to make the face, the not-quite-exasperated-yet-thinking-hard-about-it-but-also-frustrated face. And then one or both of them would call to the baby or the dogs, in a chirpy bird-brained voice or a dopey cartoon bear voice or maybe make faces at the baby or rub the dogs behind the ears and the baby would perk up and giggle and the dogs would turn and push their hind-flanks into the poets, while sniffing at the small plot of land, and then Demented Panda and Koki would get back to their talking and their note-taking and their exasperations and their frustrations and the hard work of unproductive labor.
So this is how they spent their summer, talking about themselves as they talked about the small plot of land, and the more they talked about the small plot of land and themselves at the same time the more they began to consider this talking their art practice, an art practice of meeting and, while there, doing some talking instead of doing some doing.
The days wore on. It was a sunny 78 degrees one day and then a partly cloudy 77 degrees the next and then a more sunny 79 degrees the day after that and then a slightly sunny 76 degrees followed by a mostly sunny 75 degrees. Then suddenly the summer was over. And they realized they both had worked all summer on A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cites and they had both written the same amount, which was more or less nothing. It is true that by the end of the summer Demented Panda had some notes in his notebook that he kept promising to type up and send to Koki along with some audio recordings he had made while walking around the small plot of land at night, but he never did. And it is true that Koki had written pages and pages, and then rewritten those pages and pages night after night, but her pages were so wandering and incomprehensible that they were the same as nothing.
Nonetheless, Demented Panda and Koki agreed to meet one last time on the small plot of land and talk one more time about A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cities. Demented Panda decided for this last meeting that he wanted to make a right proper big final mess. He decided he was going to cast a spell and then he mumbled something about how the first poems were probably spells. Koki then mumbled to herself that of course Demented Panda would choose a spell because spells are short and fit without effort into small notebooks and do nothing but nonetheless she eagerly agreed to be a witness to it. So this time Koki left the baby with its father and Demented Panda left the dogs in his house with a couple of rawhide bones to keep them occupied and, in the mostly sunny 76 degrees, they walked one more time to the small plot of land and there met for what they hoped would be one last time, one last mess.
Demented Panda’s spell was a simple one, aimed at gathering energy from the plot of land and its environs and from such energies shaping their picturesque story into poetry. And Demented Panda thought to himself that because the place didn’t have much energy, as it just had a lot of commuters traveling by car or rail around and through and beneath it, when the spell did not work, it would of course make perfect sense. He could then add it to his list of unfinished messes and write about that in the littlest notebook that he kept in the front pocket of his jacket.
To begin his spell, Demented Panda sat down and crossed his legs and then adjusted his stomach over his lap and then reached down and pulled his ballsack forward so he could really clear his mind and become one with himself. After he cleared his mind, he cleared his mind again. He felt that he really needed a clear mind to make the spell work, or as he figured it, not work. Then he held out two of his arms or legs and made his paws into fists. He then felt some sort of energy, perhaps the energy of the entire universe as the spell’s instructions had promised, enter his recessive paw and flow up from his ballsack and through his body and into his projective paw. He let the energy build up in his projective paw until he felt he had an immense amount of it. Then he flung his paws to the right, opened his projective paw and, while doing this, he envisioned the energies flying outward. He then recited a quick chant, one that went “give orange give me eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you,” a chant that was something Nim Chimpsky, the famous chimp who had been taught sign language by his human caretakers, had liked to sign when he was hungry for an orange. Demented Panda had decided to use the mumbling signs of Nim Chimpsky as a chant because they were slightly absurd and slightly meaningless, and reeked a little of dubious science, all of which seemed the perfect combination for his goal of performance art, the kind of performance art that someone like Demented Panda might turn to so as to express the complete collapse and failure of a project, not so much as a last resort but as the right proper culmination of the lostness of a summer and the lostness of poetry and the lostness of being a mediocre Bay Area poet.
Despite